A duty to preserve African culture?

Identity politics in the US is one thing. Forced identity politics in Africa? That's something else altogether. This article discusses the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.

The introduction of a duty to preserve a culture, particularly in Africa, is understandable given the experience of colonialism, but “understandable” doesn’t mean “OK”. People have a right to an identity, cultural or otherwise, and human rights do a great job protecting identity (there’s religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of residence etc.). But there cannot be a duty to have and preserve an identity. It seems here that the language of human rights – this is after all a human rights declaration – is used to smuggle in the opinion that it is somehow OK that a cultural identity is forced on people, and that individual identities disappear into the collective. More...

The woman (?) runner

As Conor Clarke says, all they have to do is look. (Actually, Irving Berlin said that, but Clarke says roughly the same thing.) But what do genetics say about equality?

But there is one general point to make about this kind of story, and I think it's an important one. If it turns out that the young woman has a muddily advantageous genetic composition, we would all consider it "unfair" to the other young women against whom she competes. After all, the outcome of a competition like running is supposed to be determined by training and grit, not the utterly arbitrarily presence of an extra gene.

And yet that intuition is impossible to extend. More...

Implicit biases

This article (and the linked article) opens up some interesting lines of thought about our social expectations.

In the US, and presumably the UK and elsewhere, race, ethnicity and gender automatically trigger in-group/out-group classifications. And most unfortunately, “In general, people retain information in a more detailed fashion, remember more positive information, and are more forgiving of behaviors for ingroup compared to outgroup members.” More...